The dramatic increase of popularity of the Internet has transformed many previously solitary activities to communal activities in which personal interaction is increasingly important. One such example is that of multi-player video games in which multiple players of video games play a single synchronized video game and compete with one another in a unified video game context. For example, many first-person shooter games have been transformed from solitary games in which a player virtually shoots at computer generated character targets to a multi-player game in which the targets are representations of other players—in other words, the character targets are not controlled by the computer but instead by other players.
As multi-player games grow in popularity, the desire to communicate with other players increases. However, game controllers—user input devices used in playing video games—are typically special purpose devices limited to a relatively small number of buttons and 2- or 3-dimensional directional controls or directional controls with additional dimensions. Thus, typical game controllers provide no convenient mechanism for entering textual messages to send to other players.